The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

A sk any private eye and they'll tell you - "There's no feeling like plunking another file in the "solved" tray, especially when that case was as stressful as my last one."

A couple months back, a fellow came in asking me to check out an outfit called Smithton Amalgamated Trading. The pay was good, but the job was hard. It was a case with more dead ends than a corpse's hairdo. I got my client what he needed, and he was more than a little surprised when I gave it to him.

"You - you made it out," he said. "The last two didn't."

"Investigation is a thinking girl's game," I said. "Read that sign on the door."

"A - at - I'm sorry. It's printed on the other side of the glass and I can't read backwards. Could you help me ou - " I love it when I get to do this. I grabbed his collar, yanked him down to my eye level so he could smell the spaghetti sauce on my breath, wiggled my eyebrows, and said it real slow for him.

"Alberta," I syllabified. "Alberta the Brain."

After he had stammered his way back onto the street, I set about tossing out all the notes I'd littered my desk with concerning his case. In the older ones, I'd written the whole name out: "Smithton Amalgamated Trading". Then it became "Smithton Amal Tr.", "Sm Am T", and finally - in the final month or so, when I was getting tired - "SAT". It was quite the satisfying feeling to toss all that in the "round file."

And then he came running back in.

"Sorry," he panted. "I just got a call from my partner - turns out they have an overseas branch. I'll give you an extra thousand - "

"No."

"Fifteen hundred - "

"Still no."

"I'll cancel the check to the first job if you don't look into it."

"Is that legal?"

"Was your last investigation?"

Oh dear.

SAT II took another month to scope out. I got dirt, but not all the dirt. When I traded the check for the file, he pored through the papers and gave me a quizzical look.

"Given your last investigation, I'd expectedhellip; wellhellip;higher-quality information," he said. "Perhaps you should start over - "

"NO."

"An extra five hundred -

"NO."

He sighed.

"Perhaps I should go to a different agency."

"Excellent idea. May I recommend the fellow across the alley?"

"He only has one star on Yelp."

"Well, if you'd like to see more stars, I can arrange that right here and now. I'm fed up with SAT and everything that even remotely smacks of it. Kapeesh?"

"Kapeesh," he gulped, shuffling out the door for the last time.